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A second airport in the city: Why India bucks the trend
Here, when they build something big, they want to do it much bigger the next time.
Bangalore International Airport / ImageCourtesy: gvk.com
A second airport in many capital cities is no big deal. While the main facility caters to international traffic, a secondary airport serves regional and national carriers, which is so mostly without exception.
While JFK in New York is the global airport, La Guardia is New York’s regional airport. Dulles International Airport in Washington DC is not even in the city but 40 kilometers away in Virginia while Reagan Airport serves from DC. In addition to Heathrow, London now has a cluster of six smaller mostly Europe-serving airports.
Not so in India. Here, when they build something big, they want to do it much bigger the next time.
Out of the blue last week, the state’s industries minister announced that Bangalore will shortly be scouting one of six locations to host the city’s second international airport, approximately by 2033, by which time, the embargo on starting another international airport after BIAL expires after 15 years expires. They are planning for a maximum of 100 million passenger capacity when the current terminal T1 has just about crossed 50 million and T2, 20 million.
For all these years, except for the outrageous condition of eliminating the new BLR airport, for 15 years, the old HAL airport could have served as a perfectly good airport for the region. Even now, when Tamil Nadu moots an international airport in Hosur at the Karnataka border, the Karnataka state government has turned a cold shoulder on the proposal.
This is not the first instance when the city going in for another airport decided to go big. Even though Delhi has three terminals and could be expanded, they have opened another international airport at Hindon within the same national capital region of Noida.
At the other end of the scale, when it comes to smaller airports under the UDAAN scheme, 100 are expected to be ready this year to serve interior regions. However, the story after a few months is quite different, and quite a few of these UDAAN terminals are shut down for want of even one airline to operate.
In all this, it is apparent that sound techno-commercial common sense is often overridden by larger ambitions. A modest regional airport can be extremely successful and make a lot of money for its developers but here every airport has to flaunt records: priced, biggest, best, etc.
No matter the utility -- or other options.
(The opinions expressed within the content are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of the website or its affiliates.)
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